A Nobody’s Final Days – ENIGMA:

Today I’m reaching out to give you all a recommendation for a visual novel. The title is difficult to google because it’s a popular name for songs, bands, etc. It’s not even the only game on steam with this title, so to save you some trouble, the game is here.

ENIGMA: is about a man who washes to shore on an isolated island. His name is Chester, and Chester is going to die. He’s terminal with an illness called Enigma, and there’s nothing left for him except to enjoy what time he has remaining. He settles in on the island to spend his final days in peace, meeting a few new people and trying to let go.

The story reads like BL, with many of Chester’s meaningful relationships forming around other men. However, nothing seems to last long enough to become romantic, thanks to the limited time he has remaining.

If you want a lovely little story that will make you cry, check out ENIGMA:. If you’re not yet sold, feel free to continue reading.

The following steps a bit into spoiler territory, so read on at your own risk.

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I’m Not Reviewing Love on the Peacock Express!

I’m not going to be reviewing this great, free game about dating moms and solving mysteries on a train, because I helped to write it! I’m super proud of this and the game as a whole. Thank you to everyone who is playing it, and everyone who helped to make it. I think we did a great job. <3

Please check it out here: https://trainmilfsgame.itch.io/love-on-the-peacock-express

_transfer – A Snapshot of Momentum

I had the pleasure of seeing an early build of _transfer at GDC2017, and I’m thrilled now that it’s gotten an official release. This is going to be a very short post about a game that you have to experience.

Screenshot, reading "From one there is nine. It took a bold mind, willing to do anything to save humanity from itself. The mind conceived, and two hands constructed. That is your origin. They are always talking about origins and destructions."

In science and science fiction, there are aspects that can be difficult to understand. There might be a moment of insight where between the trees you can see the sun, but as soon as it was there it’s gone and what you have is an impression of a truth that you almost knew.

In _transfer, that glimpse of the sun is the answer – it’s who you are. And the story is told in the moment of momentum where you can see it. You don’t have the origin and you don’t have the destruction, all you have is a little snapshot of time where you might see the truth if you know what you’re looking for.

If this sounds extremely bizarre and pretentious, this is just the only way I know how to explain it.

The game starts with you logging in to a conversation between AI. You don’t know who you are or where you’re going. It’s irrelevant, and many of them are quickly bored that you’re bothering them with questions about your identity. As you converse with them, memory files are recovered that shed light on the world of _transfer and the lives of these AI. As you start to piece together the themes and concepts at play, the system shuts down and forces you to start anew.

Every time you start a new round in _transfer, important concepts accumulate. If you want to take in all the information, you might want to take notes, but the AI designations change every time, so you can’t count on those. Soon you’ll discover the unimportance of linearity in the “lives” of these AI. They inquire about conversations that you had in previous rounds. You play in a circle, and every time you learn a little more.

The AI in _transfer are curious and confused about sex. “Humans are so obsessed with their own survival that they watch videos of other humans procreating,” reads one of the memory logs. “They are always talking about origins and destructions,” says another. I feel like this is what _transfer is about. Without creation or destruction, what are you at all? I think _transfer is saying that we’re in transit. We’re transferring, from one place to another, and that’s the sunlight through the trees that it’s attempting to express.

_transfer is a fascinating little thesis-statement of a game about AI and the transit of existence. It’s the kind of game that couldn’t have been anything but a game in order to tell this story as intended, and that’s the highest praise I can give anything. Check it out.

Webcomp: the not-Webcomic

Webcomics have evolved beyond being what we formally understand to be comics. We use the word “comics” for them because, while they sometimes don’t look like comics or sound like comics, readers don’t have language to call them anything different. We say “webcomics” because they’re often image-heavy stories we read online. I believe that this simplification can be harmful to people who are creating narratives outside the box, because it’s difficult to find our market. How will people know what to look for when what they want isn’t anything like a webcomic?

This is what I want to call a Webcomp: a Composite Web Narrative. A webcomp is a story where the medium is the web, and it utilizes any and all of the features available to it in that format. There is no operating terminology for this form of storytelling that encapsulates what it is. Most often, readers will refer to it as a “webcomic”, in spite of everything that it isn’t, because it’s the best word we have to describe it.

Let’s get into this in some more detail.

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DATE THAT DAD! – Dream Daddy

I’ve played a lot of visual novels, and a good half of them or so have been dating sims of some kind. My experience with dating sims in North America has been rather disappointing, compared to some of the treasured stories I’ve read that come from Japan or South Korea, so when I saw Dream Daddy release with fanfare, I had very low expectations.

And I was pleasantly surprised!

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The Wrath of the Wronged – The House in Fata Morgana REVIEW

You’re lost. You’re tired. You’re hungry and you’re sick. You’re stumbling through a forest knowing that if you stop walking, someone will find you. Your life is in danger, be it from a misfortune, a mistake, or a vendetta. You call out to any god or spirit that might be listening to please have mercy and provide you refuge. That’s when you see it: a huge mansion in the woods. The House in Fata Morgana.

The House in Fata Morgana — or as I will call it from here on: Fata Morgana — is the visual novel debut by the group Novectacle, localized into English by Manga Gamer. It guides you by the hand with the help of The Maid as you learn the misfortunes of the people who lived in the mansion over a thousand years. There’s much more to it than that, but to say more would ruin the story for you. This VN is very hard to summarize and review without ruining things.

Fata Morgana, although written by a Japanese team, is a gothic story at it’s core about sin and forgiveness. It handles many themes of Christianity with thoughtfulness, tact, and a bit of the Japanese worldview mixed in. Fata Morgana stands on its own, without falling back on tropes and benchmarks like you often find in visual novels. Fata Morgana is like reading a book more than any visual novel I’ve read before.

If you’re interested, here’s a list of bullet point things that Fata Morgana does well, out of context to sell you on it without providing specific spoilers:

  • Lack of communication ruining relationships.
  • How not to cope with being a psychopath.
  • Toxic masculinity destroying everything.
  • Mistrust due to personal baggage.
  • Recovering from trauma.
  • Being a trans person in a shitty, shitty time.
  • People making stupid fucking mistakes intrinsic to their character flaws that ruin other peoples’ lives.
  • Acceptance.

I was waiting for things to fuss about over this story, but it is very well done. The narrative is tight. The localization is smooth as hell. The art is good. The music is good. Every character is a fully realized human. Some of the jokes were really dumb? So I guess there was that.

Fata Morgana had a perfect score on Steam by recommendation, and I believe it was well deserved.

Continue on for a summary just a little less careful about spoilers:

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Persona 5 is the JRPG we’ve been waiting for

Persona 5 has disgusting portrayals of gay men, and gross camera shots of female characters for fanservice. These aspects (especially the former) I won’t forgive. However, they weren’t enough for me to give up on Persona 5. The work it does in reestablishing what JRPGs can do is, to me, moving. The graphics, the gameplay, and everything that is included in the game justifies the release date delays. It was all worth it. It’s beautiful, it plays well, and most importantly to me: it establishes itself as a part of the larger Persona/SMT canon.

The troubles surrounding the translation is undeniable, and has been talked about at length in game journalism, so I don’t think there’s more I can offer to the conversation. For the sake of sparing spoilers to anyone, here’s a quick rundown:

Bad:

  • Localisation
  • Homophobia
  • Fanservice exploiting the female characters
  • Endless material made to pander to every (straight male) gamer’s fetish

Good:

  • Dungeons each have a unique design to enhance the narrative
  • UI is beautiful, battles are fun and slick
  • Enhances features that characterized the past two Persona games (school days timeline, stat generation)
  • The narrative design and plot arc structure is very good
  • Futaba’s mental illness is dealt with sympathetically and that is incredible

Persona 5 has a finely fabricated mystery. Character’s arcs, plot developments, and major reveals are telegraphed well enough that you can see them coming, but they build suspense. It isn’t perfect, which I believe are caused by how many storylines they juggle at once and the different ways the player might handle them. I don’t feel like I can fault the dev team for that. Writing games is hard.

Persona 5 makes me excited to see where the future of JRPGs is going to go. Anyone who loves RPGs or games should play it, even if you haven’t seen the series before. I feel like it understand what was created here would be an asset in a developer’s arsenal for the future.

As said above, the most I got out of the game was seeing it tie into the lore of it’s predecessors, specifically into the concepts of Persona 2. Although the allusions were vague, I believe the relation was deliberate. I hope to write a post on that in a year, when I don’t have to worry about spoiling anyone.

Persona 5 has been in development for years, but the themes of rebellion and breaking the shackles of society’s expectations appears to be globally relevant. Older SMT fans might be able to turn to Persona 5 to understand the feelings of today’s youth, while millennials like myself may be touched by the sense of worldwide solidarity, like I was. In the end, all we can do is inherit the earth, make it ours, and make it right.

NieR:Automata – Games, Novels, and Divine Evolution

In recent years, Yoko Taro has grown from a small Japanese developer, to an auteur who I believe will be making waves alongside Hideo Kojima and Suda51 before long. NieR: Automata is his biggest hit to date, and rather emblematic of what he does when it comes to game and narrative design. NieR games pull in elements from many genres in order to create a game that says things about all games. In this post I’m going to talk a little about this gameplay mosiac and how it works, and the story themes about evolution to godhood in a story about AI.

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The Mental Illness Story We Deserve – Night in the Woods

Oh my goodness Night in the Woods was really something.

Night in the Woods is a simple story game and almost-platformer about Mae Borovski when she comes home after quitting college. She returns to her childhood home of Possum Springs, to the place and the people she’d left behind. Why did she quit school? Why is everyone so hostile toward her? Why does she have dreams of giant animals in the woods?

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I liked Oxenfree too much to have anything to say on it.

Usually when I have a lot to write about a game or whatever I’m reviewing, it’s because some aspect of it either blew my mind or disappointed me. People are interested in what I have to say after I played Oxenfree, but it’s hard because Oxenfree is a very solid, respectable game. I recommend it to people looking for a small, good story, but that’s about all I’ve got.

I loved the characters. I love their interactions. I loved the effects of the dialogue on events. Oxenfree was a linear story with relationships that changed. All of the characters were frustrating teenage brats. It was wonderful.

I feel a little strange writing a review of a game without having a pedestal and a pointing stick to outline every little thing in it that blew my mind, or I hated. Oxenfree effectively used established expectations in games to create something good. It’s a solid story that used its mechanics in an interesting way. It’s a good way to show simply how these things can all be harnessed and used well.

However, it didn’t do anything that I believed was revolutionary. And while that may sound like an insult, I don’t mean it as one. Not every single game needs to revolutionize anything. I will play and enjoy every single Telltale Game, regardless of whether or not it gives me something new. Oxenfree is a good game, and that’s just fine. Give me more of this sort of ghost story. Give me more light interaction games. Give me more.

Play Oxenfree for a good ghost story with meaty characters. Enjoy it for that. And please, Night School, give me more.

4/5, highly recommended to people who like things that are good.